The FIFA World Cup presents big opportunities for brands to create successful mobile advertising campaigns, especially with the evolution of location-based and geo-targeting capabilities.

The event lets companies incorporate mobile into their campaigns. Brands can alert consumers via banner ads and SMS alerts and keep them up-to-date on all the happenings surrounding the World Cup.

?Big brands always jump at the opportunity to run campaigns against brand-name events like the World Cup,? said Bob Walczak, CEO of Ringleader Digital, New York. ?The Cup presents opportunities across the whole mobile ecosystem ? applications, mobile Web and SMS.

?We?ll see fans downloading World Cup applications so they know what?s going on in every game,? he said. ?Sites like ESPN will have tons of traffic on their World Cup score pages, and for the diehard fans they?ll be getting SMS updates every time a goal is scored.

?We expect to see big brands running campaigns against all these mediums.?

Ringleader Digital is a mobile third-party ad serving network.

Mobile interaction
The Associated Press recently released an application that was specifically designed to enhance the World Cup experience for fans.

Users are able to browse the application in multiple languages such as English, Spanish, French and Portuguese and customize skins, which feature the 32 countries participating in the tournament (see story).

According to Mr. Walczak, there is an opportunity here for a brand to run a global campaign and target soccer fans around the world by simply changing the creative and landing page depending on what country the user is in.

"There is an amazing opportunity here for brands to create a strong presence across all of the screens we?ll be glued to throughout the event,? Mr. Walczak said. ?Using mobile as a complement to more traditional advertising always increases the performance of a campaign.? 

Mobile kick off
ESPN Deportes also kicked off mobile coverage of the event.

ESPN Deportes Movil, the network's emerging mobile platform is letting users sign up for free Spanish language text message updates to receive select scores and news.

Users can text the keyword FUTBOL to the short code 43776.

?SMS will certainly be one great way to follow the action,? Mr. Walczak said. ?Here in New York most of the action will be happening during the day, so SMS updates will keep us connected.?